(New York-October 28, 2016) To coincide with the presidential election, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Benny Andrews: The Bicentennial Series – the gallery’s second solo exhibition featuring the work of Benny Andrews (American, 1930-2006). This exhibition will consist of paintings and drawings from all six individual subseries – Symbols, Trash, Circle, Sexism, War and Utopia - which in their totality comprise The Bicentennial Series.

Completed between 1970 to 1975, The Bicentennial Series was conceived to reveal one Black Americans view of the United States at a time when the country was celebrating a milestone and feeling nostalgic. Fearing that black Americans would be invisible from all Bicentennial narratives and celebrations, Benny Andrews devoted himself to sharing his “feelings and impressions of this place–America.” By completing six distinctive groups of works (monumental-scale paintings and drawings) with themes that include southern rituals, oppression, justice/injustice, incarceration, regeneration, war, inequality, technology, feminism, motherhood, the absence of humanity, fantasy and idealized beauty, Andrews raised a consciousness. Holding deeply to his southern roots and masterfully crafting timeless allegories, Andrews revealed American truths that are today as relevant as they were 40 years ago.

This exhibition will be the first opportunity to see work from all six subseries together; the majority of works have never been exhibited publicly. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue with an essay by Pellom McDaniels III, Ph.D., Curator of African American collections in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Library at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. In his essay, McDaniels writes:
The Bicentennial Series provided Andrews a unique opportunity to examine America as he saw it. His overall program included redefining the position of black artists within the realm of contemporary art while advancing an understanding of people of African descent as integral to the history of the United States. Indeed, in the post-civil-rights era of the 1970s, whereby black people had achieved the designated outcome of full-citizenship rights through the discourse of social movements, Andrews’s use of art and art production as a tool of resistance and reinforcement of the narratives that mattered to “the folks” is significant. Through his art, Andrews was able to communicate and frame the contributions made by the Black church to ground black communities, the significance of black women to the communities they fostered and cared for, and the vulnerability of the oppressed in an ostensibly democratic system that had been founded in support of white supremacy.

Benny Andrews (1930-2006) was born in rural Georgia and devoted his career to championing African Americans and their stories. In 1948, Andrews graduated from high school and with a 4-H Club scholarship enrolled in Georgia’s Fort Valley State College. He joined the United States Air Force, served in the Korean War, and attained the rank of staff sergeant before receiving an honorable discharge in 1954. With funding from the GI Bill, Andrews enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1958, he completed his bachelor of fine arts degree and moved to New York City.

In New York, Andrews lived on Suffolk Street, befriended other Lower East Side figurative expressionists that included Red Grooms, Bob Thompson, Lester Johnson and Nam June Paik, and continued to develop his “rough collage” technique that often combined rugged scraps of paper and cloth with paint on canvas. As Andrews explained, “I started working with collage because I found oil paint so sophisticated, and I didn’t want to lose my sense of rawness.” By the 1960s, Andrews mastered this technique, and in 1962, Bella Fishko invited Andrews to become a member of Forum Gallery, which gave him his first New York solo exhibition. Additional solo exhibitions followed there in 1964 and 1966. In 1965, with funding from a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, Andrews traveled home to Georgia and began working on his Autobiographical Series. In 1971, The Studio Museum in Harlem presented the first works completed of The Bicentennial Series. In 1975, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta presented four subseries from The Bicentennial Series; the exhibition traveled to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum in Ithaca, NY and the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Boston.

A self-described “people’s painter,” Andrews focused on figurative social commentary depicting the struggles, atrocities, and everyday occurrences in the world, but he was not satisfied to use art as a substitute for action. In 1968, he began a career at Queens College, City University of New York, where he was part of the college’s SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) program, designed to help students from underserved areas prepare for college. In 1969, he became a founding member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), which formed coalitions with other artists’ groups, protested the exclusion of women and men of color from institutional and historical canons, and advocated for greater representation of black artists, curators, and intellectuals within major museums. Together with Jay Milder, Peter Passuntino, Nicholas Sperakis, Peter Dean, Michael Fauerbach, Bill Barrell, Leonel Gongora, and Ken Bowman, Andrews participates in the founding of the Rhino Horn Group. In 1971, the art classes Andrews had been teaching at the Manhattan Detention Complex (“the Tombs”) became the cornerstone of a major prison art program initiated under the auspices of the BECC that expanded across the country. In 1976, he became the art coordinator for the Inner City Roundtable of Youths (ICRY)—an organization comprised of gang members in the New York metropolitan area who seek to combat youth violence by strengthening urban communities. From 1982 to 1984, he directed the Visual Arts Program, a division of the National Endowment for the Arts (1982-84), and in 1997, Andrews became a member of the National Academy of Design. Shortly before his death in 2006, Andrews was working on a project in the Gulf Coast with children displaced by Hurricane Katrina. In 2002, the Benny Andrews Foundation was established to help emerging artists gain greater recognition and to encourage artists to donate their work to historically black museums. Andrews work is represented in over fifty public collections including the Detroit Institute of Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), The Museum of Modern Art (NY), Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), The Studio Museum in Harlem (NY), and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, CT).

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery represents the Estate of Benny Andrews and this exhibition has been organized with their cooperation.

SPECIAL EVENT
In conjunction with this exhibition, dynamic saxophonist, composer, improviser and mixed media sound conceptualist Matana Roberts will perform live at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery on Saturday, November 12 @ 4:00pm (Reservations required: rsvp@michaelrosenfeldart.com); Roberts presents a conceptual acoustic sound quilt for brass choir, titled …it’s all a damn game. Her performance is a response to Andrews’ masterpiece Circle (1971), included in the exhibition.

Senior & Shopmaker is pleased to present Polly Apfelbaum: Atomic Mystic Portraits, an exhibition of the artist’s recent monoprints and woodblock prints produced in collaboration with her longtime publisher, Durham Press. In her fabric sculptures, installations, ceramics, and works on paper, Apfelbaum explores complex formal and chromatic relationships, pushing the canon of modernist abstraction in decidedly original directions. Her work is steeped in references to feminism, women's work, craft, and fashion, and in particular the cultural associations inherent in pattern and design.

A recipient of the Rome Prize in 2013-14, Apfelbaum’s Italian visit led to a fascination with the drapery and colored fabrics depicted in Renaissance and Baroque paintings. The fluorescent color of her Byzantine Rocker series is achieved by Apfelbaum’s employment of the split fountain or “rainbow roll” technique, in which multiple colors are partially mixed to achieve a continuous gradient effect. The technique appears again but in smaller segments in works such as Mosaic Mile, a large-scale monoprint inspired by decorative inlay mosaic floors typical of medieval Italian architecture. The “Cosmati” technique entailed elaborate inlays of small triangles and rectangles of colored stones. In Apfelbaum’s work, the effect is crafted from a lexicon of 1500 hand-laid, mosaic-like blocks which are inked and printed in different combinations on heavy handmade paper. The dazzling color and pattern of her new series, Atomic Mystic Portraits and Atomic Mystic Puzzles, are studies in the formal relationship of parts to the whole.

Born in 1955 in Abingdon, Pennsylvania, Polly Apfelbaum resides in New York. Her solo exhibition Face (Geometry) Naked (Eyes) is on view at the Ben Maltz Gallery, OTIS College of Arts and Design, Los Angeles, CA through December 4, 2016. Her work is included in the collections of the Perez Art Museum, Miami; Museum of Modern of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of Art of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; and Musée D’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, among others.

New York NY … Beginning 10 November 2016, Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’, an exhibition of sculptures by Paul McCarthy. Featuring works from the artist’s most important projects of the last 15 years, including ‘WS’, ‘Caribbean Pirates’, and ‘Pig Island’, ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’ celebrates McCarthy’s distinctive process in the making and un-making of an artwork.

About the Exhibition
Hauser & Wirth will present a new series by McCarthy of bronze ‘White Snow Dwarfs’ alongside the original clay sculptures from which they were cast. These most recent works in the artist’s major ongoing project ‘White Snow’ vividly illustrate the roles that repetition and variation play in his oeuvre. McCarthy’s 2013 video installation at the Park Avenue Armory ‘White Snow’ is the modern interpretation of Walt Disney’s beloved 1937 animated classic film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, in which the original stories’ archetypal narratives are pitched against real human drives and desires.

McCarthy’s original sculpted clay dwarves were altered and distorted variations of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs. Even in their original iterations, McCarthy’s clay figures possessed additional layers of abstraction as a result of having been sculpted and re-sculpted via the artist’s frantic and impulsive performative process. They were subsequently cast in silicone (2010 – 2012), and although those richly colored versions are not included in ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’, they are integral manifestations of the journey that has produced this remarkable body of work to date. The process of silicone casting abstracted the original clay sculptures further, so that a second casting in bronze have acquired a new degree of rawness and pathos. Presented en masse, McCarthy’s bronze and clay dwarves reveal the artist‘s engagement with the life cycles of materials and together elicit meditations upon time, mortality, and the role of art in a realm of thought beyond the limits of flesh.

Also on view in the exhibition will be the large-scale installation ‘Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation’ (2013 – 2016) from McCarthy’s Caribbean Pirates series. In this darkly carnivalesque work, a pair of disjoined clay figures wearing huge pirate hats, loom over a landscape littered with broken body casts, chairs, wooden platforms, sex toys, buckets, mugs, among other detritus, all punctuated by dollops of viscous, deep yellow polyurethane foam. Inspired by the Disneyland attraction ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, the Caribbean Pirates project began in 2001 as a collaboration between Paul McCarthy and his son Damon McCarthy; it has produced a prodigious body of work, including sculptures, performance, and film. ‘Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation’ is the merging of a pair of individual large-scale works in the series, based on two drawings by McCarthy – ‘Chopper’ and ‘Amputation’ – that were originally intended to stand independently from one another. Envisioned as a pirate boat, the installation rests on carpets that stand in for water filled with debris: the trash that has been thrown overboard by the vessel’s unruly occupants.

Along with ‘Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation’, the exhibition includes ‘Amputation (AMP), Blue Fiberglass’ (2013 – 2016), a blue fiberglass cast of ‘Amputation’ never before exhibited. ‘Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation’ will have changed from previous showings due to the process of removing ‘Amputation’ from the larger work in order to mold and cast the blue fiberglass iteration. As with the clay dwarf sculptures, ‘Amputation’ has undergone a separate journey and further abstraction in McCarthy’s endless loop of action.

The exhibition will be completed by ‘Paula Jones’ (2005 – 2008) and ‘Puppet’ (2005 – 2008), both born out of McCarthy’s mammoth, celebrated opus ‘Pig Island’ (2005 – 2010). Combining political figures and elements drawn from pop culture, ‘Pig Island’ evolved over seven years in the artist’s studio, ultimately becoming a surreal compilation of themes that have coursed through McCarthy’s work for decades. Originally conceptualized as an island of robotic pirates and pigs, drawing inspiration from the earlier ‘Piccadilly Circus’ (2003), ‘Pig Island’ is populated by pirates, pigs, likenesses of George W. Bush and Angelina Jolie, an assortment of Disney characters, and the artist himself, all carousing in a state of reckless abandon. Originally part of this dark bacchanal, the sculptures ‘Puppet’ and ‘Paula Jones’ feature caricatures of former President George W. Bush and pot-bellied pigs engaged in sexual acts.

On view through 14 January 2017, ‘Raw Spinoffs Continuations’ will be the final exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s West 18th Street space. The gallery’s new temporary home is 548 West 22nd Street, adjacent to the site of its future freestanding building at 542 West 22nd Street.

Koenig & Clinton is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Brandon Lattu. On the occasion of his fifth solo presentation in New York, the gallery focuses on three new bodies of work: Columns, Obsolete Subjects and Polish Villages. The Polish Village works directly reference Frank Stella's famed series of the same name from the early 1970s.

Physically anchoring the exhibition are six evenly spaced columns arranged in two rows. Each column is divided into 12 different levels that progress incrementally in geometrical facets and each is clad in different materials across the rudimentary grid. Together, they seem to support a phantom second floor of the gallery.

Materials change from the straightforward reflection of light in a set of white painted and mirrored columns, to the separation of light in RGB mirror and visual spectrum columns, and lastly to textual references about colors from Frank Stella paintings circa 1958–1966 as well as hardwoods harvested at the end of the 19th century in the Eastern United States. At times, notational antecedents are specific in that they denote color or material, while in other instances they are tangential, nodding towards the implementation of a certain progression or the titling of a particular body of work.

Installed on separate gallery walls, once quotidian scenarios—a boy reaching for the receiver at a payphone, a girl withdrawing cash from an automated teller machine, and an old pushbutton phone—introduce Lattu's Obsolete Subjects series. These works, like others throughout the artist's career are printed at actual size, bringing the viewer closer to a readymade version of the original subject and prioritizing the in-person experience of the work. Meanwhile, a curved aluminum frame surrounds each image, matching the radial curve of the payphone and ATM as well as the mobile phone that is replacing them. This balance between presence and obsolescence is complicated by the realization that the figures in the images are not posed in front of the actual devices of fading technology but instead in front of life–size photographs.

Curved frames appear once more, this time with a noticeably thicker profile in the sinuous Polish Villages series. Visiting a turning point in Frank Stella's practice, Lattu photographs black and white halftone reproductions from a museum catalog dedicated to Stella's first reliefs—the Polish Village Series, works that Lattu considers to be among the first significant post-modern paintings. These reliefs were in turn inspired by Wooden Synagogues, a book by Kazimirez and Maria Piechotka documenting Polish wooden synagogues destroyed by the Nazis.

Rather than conforming to the curves of the reliefs themselves, Lattu's images are shaped by the curve of each open book page that has been photographed in available light from reading distance (rather than scanned). In each image, the shaped relief has been systematically emptied out. Purposely abdicating any choice about color, the artist automatically fills the phantom shape with the matching tone of the surrounding page.

In a final gesture, Lattu lifts the artwork title that was originally printed in the lower corner and moves it to the center of the void. As the textual reference is reprioritized to the level of figure, patterning and resonance from the paintings themselves create the periphery. This short set of moves allows Lattu to economically reverse figure and ground on the page and by association the black and white reproduction of the painting.

Taken as a whole, this exhibition persists on the fringes of a delineated perspective, while subsuming challenges to its own placement. Though distilled in formalist context, Lattu's works easily glide through their precepts to carry their own weight. Referents emerge, and dissipate, clearing an open territory for the viewer to consider history, both recent and receding while compressing the imperative of time. By triangulating sculptures, recent photographic images of outdated machines, and references to paradigmatic paintings of early post-modernism, Lattu forges technological and ontological links that span from the early 1960s to the present.

Brandon Lattu (b. 1970, Athens, GA) earned his M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998 and his B.F.A. from the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C. in 1994. His solo exhibitions include: The Happy Lion, Los Angeles, CA; Vacio 9, Madrid, Spain; Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, BC; and the Bielefelder Kunstverein, Beilefeld, Germany, among others. Recent group exhibitions include: Rideaux/Blinds, IAC Villeurbanne; Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Electric Fields, Surrealism and Beyond, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; Attitude Cinema, Pesaro Film Festival, Italy; How Many Billboards, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, West Hollywood, CA; Walker Evans and the Barn, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Image for Image, Museum Ostwall, Dortmunder, Germany; Tractatus Logico-Catalogicus, Vox centre de l'image contemporaine, Montreal; and The Movement of Images, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Lattu currently holds the position of associate professor and chair of the Art Department at the University of California, Riverside; he lives and works in Los Angeles.

For further information please contact info@koenigandclinton.com or call (212) 334-9255. Hours of operation are Tuesday–Saturday, 11AM–6PM and by appointment.

In 1971, Sun Ra said “Black people need a mythocracy, not a democracy because they'll never make it in history.…Truth is not permissible for me to use because I'm not righteous and holy, I'm evil, that's because I'm black and I'm not subscribed to any types of righteousness.” Sondra Perry's new video installation examines this active disinterest in the respectability that blackness has been perpetually asked to earn by white culture, providing a site in which her work, as well its viewers, can begin to reimagine standing value systems and moral structures. Through the lens of the Alien movie franchise— one which has been providing allegories of colonialism and mutability for decades—Perry's work asks: how do agents of power behave when their subjects become absolutely unpredictable, fluidly inhabiting societal norms in order to destroy them? How can these defiantly multiplicitous subjects be watched? And how is veracity redefined by this surveillance? Curated by Lumi Tan.

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce Carrie Mae Weems’ first solo exhibition in New York City since the historic retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2014. Her influential career continues to address the rifts caused by race, class, and gender via imagery and text that is both sharply direct and beautifully poetic. This two-part exhibition highlights her recent investigations into performance, entertainment, and history.
Blue Notes (2014) and An Essay on Equivalents, See… (2011-2015) highlight figures on the periphery, bringing them front and center. The photographic series are paired with the enigmatic video installation Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me (2012), originally commissioned by the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. The work rests on a 19th century optical trick, “Pepper’s ghost,” in which a strategically lit pane of glass reflects people and objects as dematerialized versions on stage. Weems employs this phantasmagoria to examine her own relationship to history and two individuals in particular: the 16th president of the United States and artist/activist Lonnie Graham, her sometime collaborator. Here history becomes theater, a succession of ghostly projections that draw us in to the strange ways in which representation seduces and manipulates, and how some are left out of history altogether, their apparitions left to haunt the expanses of Western culture.
The theme of performance continues with Scenes & Take (2016). Weems dons her black-robed muse persona—recognizable from the now iconic Roaming and Museums series—to stand before empty stage sets, documenting these encounters with vivid color photographs. The contemplative pose of the artist raises issues of who gets to be shown on screen; what do the fictional characters in television, theater, cinema, and visual art say about the cultural climate in which they are created, and how do these representations shift across time?
All the Boys (2016) responds to the recent killings of young African American men and suggests a darker reality of identity construction. Portraits of black men in hooded sweatshirts are matched with text panels. The written descriptions evoke police reports, underscoring how a demographic is all-too-often targeted and presumed guilty by a system plagued with prejudice.
Taken as a whole, the exhibition demonstrates that visual representation is ultimately performance: a tightly composed, laborious narrative. It takes serious work to unravel and refocus the greater dialogue toward inclusivity and acceptance. To look closely—past the bright lights, illusions, and constructions—is the first, crucial step.
Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Frist Center for Visual Art, Nashville; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Prospect.3 New Orleans; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain. A solo exhibition, Carrie Mae Weems: I once knew a girl…, is currently on view through January 7, 2017 at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University. Her work is also part of Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art at Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University through January 8, 2017.
Weems has received a multitude of awards, grants, and fellowships including Anderson Ranch Arts Center’s National Artist Award; The Art of Change Ford Foundation Fellowship; the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal; the MacArthur “Genius” grant; US Department of State’s Medals of Arts; Anonymous Was A Woman Award; Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; the National Endowment of the Arts; and the Louis Comfort TIfffany Award; among many others.
She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In his newest series of twenty-one works, Christoph Ruckhӓberle replaces oil paints with dramatic contrasts rendered in high gloss enamel. Influenced by his experience as a master printmaker accustomed to creating compositions with an economy of means, the artist exploits various techniques of drawing, cutting and taping to achieve stark juxtapositions of flatness and depth. The bold pigments are not mixed, and different layers of hues react with one another to create inconsistencies that themselves become the attestations of painterly gesture

Ruckhӓberle continues to wrestle, challenge and confront the masters that have come before. Alluding to traditional ideals of painting, which may be both revered and criticized, his subject, in fact, becomes painting itself.

The artist has been widely acclaimed including several reviews in The New York Times which first described the work as “refreshingly unlike the usual painterly fare in Chelsea,” (Ken Johnson, 2004), later noted that he "seems to approach painting as an open book, of which any page can be ripped out, as long as it is used in, and not simply pasted to, the present” (Roberta Smith, 2006) and then described his 2013 exhibition at ZieherSmith as “an arresting show that makes us remember what all the fuss was about” (Karen Rosenberg).

His work has been exhibition extensively in museums internationally, including in 2016 at the Nationale Art Museum & Goethe Institut Hanoi, Vietnam and the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas. Notable collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Rubell Collection, Miami, Florida.

“I was drawn to painting tower blocks not because I had any personal message to say, but because I felt that it was a striking element of the landscape. It’s like Constable had the Stour Valley and Turner had the Medway, and I have Camberwell. This is what landscape painters do – they keep going back to familiar subjects and views and finding new inspiration in them. Cézanne used to say that he could always paint the Mont Saint Victoire. By moving his feet a few inches, he would find a new view. By changing his position, only slightly, he would find another painting.” - David Hepher

Flowers Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by British artist David Hepher, the artist’s first solo presentation in the United States. For forty years British artist David Hepher has focused his singular vision on the domestic high-rises of South London, through which he has channelled the diverse currents that have swept the international world of contemporary art. Finding his subject in the expansive social housing estates built throughout the 1960s and 70s, Hepher has captured the formal beauty of their grid-like structures as well as the physical and emotional traces of their inhabitants.
The paintings in the present exhibition span the past two decades. In paintings of the 2000’s such as Winterreise, the austere realist style of Hepher’s early work was replaced by an increased engagement with the physical nature of the subject matter, and appropriation of architectural elements such as concrete and spray paint within his mixed media paintings. Works such as Durrington Towers II have been prepared with a brutal shuttered concrete ground, which replicates the builder’s application of textured facades, and pushes the paintings to the brink of abstraction. The surface is overlaid with the spraycan scrawls and slogans of found graffiti, alongside Hepher’s own marks and art historical motifs, softening the hard-edged geometric structures with the feathered curves of gestural expression.

A recent series of smaller works, known collectively as ‘pavement horizons’, marks a distinct shift in viewpoint and scale. Honing in on the juncture at which the buildings rise from the ground, each painting portrays a life-size frontal view of a section of concrete wall and the right angle it forms with the pavement, presenting an intimate record of an ordinarily overlooked aspect of the landscape. While the concrete draws the eye to the surface, they can also conjure the impression of a sublime landscape, an illusion upheld by evocative titles such as Cloudburst and The Monk by the Sea, the latter named after a work by German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich. In contrast to the monumentality of the towers, their human scale places the viewer in close physical proximity to the subject, inviting intimate reflection on the quiet aesthetic qualities of these frequently bypassed details of modern life.

CELEBRATING 40
Selections From Kathy Markel’s Personal Collection and Highlights From the Gallery

December 1st – December 23rd , 2016

NEW YORK, NY—October 25th, 2016—Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to present a group show celebrating our 40th anniversary.

Kathryn Markel came to New York City in 1975 to start her own gallery after working as a traveling prints salesmen for Landfall Press. She transitioned from prints to original works on paper, then expanded to include paintings, developing a program that valued rigorous yet beautiful works that could be accessible to those beyond what she considered to be the art world elite. Moving from the Upper East Side, to SoHo, and finally to Chelsea in September 2001, Markel navigated the market while staying loyal to her sensibility and passion for nurturing contemporary artists.

To honor this journey, we will be featuring two collections of works. Kathryn Markel will be choosing pieces from her personal collection gathered from artists she has represented and admired over the course of her career. Accompanying this showcase will be highlights from the gallery’s program, representing our current exploratory direction.

The curated pieces speak to the gallery’s backbone of impactful abstraction with a foundation of strong formal technique. Work by Deborah Zlotsky and Marcelyn McNeil showcase a masterful grasp of using color to create form and space, and developing tension through dynamic relationships. There is a push-pull in their paintings that results in a constant shifting of foreground and background, and flatness and depth. Sydney Licht represents our group of artists that subvert the conventions of traditional realms like still life and landscape. Her fresh perspective on still life is marked by shifted points of view, abstracted forms, and modern subjects. Donald Martiny and Martina Nehrling break painting down to its essence and relish the possibilities of color. Martiny creates hyperbolic gestural brush strokes freed from traditional support with his unique mixture of polymer and pigment, while Nehrling paints with isolated strokes of highly saturated color to build rhythmic imagery. Eric Blum and Debra Smith stretch the boundaries of what constitutes painting with their use of textiles. They are both grounded by modernist techniques and sensibilities, but Blum reveals his work through layering ink-washed silks with wax, while Smith pieces together vintage silk materials to form imagery that speaks in the same language as painting.

Conceived upon photography’s inherent potential to meld images of the world with the idiosyncrasies of the creative mind, “Changed: The Altered Photograph,” an exhibition co-curated by Frank Maresca and David Winter, presents a sweeping compendium of works bridging more than 150 years. Pulled from diverse provenance, techniques, and genres—from the dawn of the field to modern art, from anonymous vernacular pieces to avant-garde and pop art, and culminating in compellingly dissimilar contemporary oeuvres—the works here collected deviate resolutely, both aesthetically and ideologically, from the notion of the photographic imprint as a “clean” or objective depiction of visual truth. Furthermore, they offer sharp insights into the history of the medium—its experimental spirit—and glimpses of a possible, albeit capricious, alternative narrative of cultural history.
This trip down the camera obscura rabbit hole starts, paradoxically, with an absent portrait; a cut paper silhouette of a female profile with an abstracted torso placed over an image-less daguerreotype plate—both layers stacked in the original frame. This object, dating ca. 1845-60, is symbolic of how photography added strata of complexity to the role of portraiture in identity. Within the rigid Victorian outline, the vacant surface becomes a mirror that returns the image of the viewer, a presence always shifting and pointing to the medium’s nuclear illusion: the instant eternally suspended. Henceforth, selected early portraits (dating back to ca. 1890 and ca. 1920) glare back at us from the ambivalent threshold between that first photographic exposure and the tender, or sometimes conspicuous, touch of the human hand.
In two dual portraits, conceivably of two sisters and two brothers posing in rather enigmatic circumstances (the girls clasping hands around a cascading fabric; the two young men facing each other in front of a slightly open curtain concealing no discernable background), the added tracings and highlights dissolve and reemerge as our eye wanders. This confluence of fact and fiction also occurs in two dignified likenesses of black women. The delicate sfumatos, the contouring or sharpening of their features, and the striking sculptural quality in the dress one of them is wearing—together with the inexplicable patch in her forehead—all imbue life and visual interest into originally low-contrast prints made with giant sunlight enlargers. Something similarly captivating occurs in the image of two baseball players (their iconic specificity heightened by the painterly details and the dreamlike foggy background) and the photo-collage of a soldier, which strikes as an apparition, emerging with his cap and shotgun from a blotchy airbrushed peacock-blue background. This work’s multidimensionality—with its added photos of people, plausibly involved in the soldier’s backstory, and seed packet cut-outs bearing rose variety illustrations—accentuates its status as a commemorative item and a psychological dimension often elusive in photography. However much the additions and enhancements made to these works responded to the technical constraints of the medium’s infancy, their moody and mysterious patina is both the essence of their “vintage” and contemporary appeal; their eloquence as deliberate, autonomous objects.
“Changed,” also includes altered photographs incorporated into works of graphic design, advertisement, and media from the 1920s to the 1950s; pictures fabricated for practical ends, to evoke feelings and associations, to convey humor and irony or add visual commentary. This chapter comprises a series of illustrations from a hardware catalogue; a mechanical menagerie of sorts, consisting of single photographs of diverse metal parts painted over to make them more realistic in color and volume, creating a contrast with the flat, untouched backdrop that reminds us of Magritte’s conceptual usage of trompe l’oeil. Also included is a rare collage, produced by the Paris advertising agency Éditions Paul-Martial. With its contrasting exposures and surreal treatment of space and nautical forms—and removed from what may have been a brochure, poster, or magazine ad—this work becomes profoundly evocative. This diverse segment concludes with two bodies of work rooted in mass media: that of editorial cartoonist Vaughn Shoemaker, who used photographic reportage as an interactive basis for his character John Q. Public (debuted in The Chicago Daily News) and Arthur Fellig’s (i.e. Weegee’s) lampooning distortions of Marilyn Monroe. Through Weegee’s mastery with lens and darkroom manipulation, Monroe’s presence and her surroundings become malleable substances—the artist stretches an arm here, a leg there, thickens the torso, or multiplies the subject’s always smiling face. These alterations approach the psychedelic language of funhouse mirror reflections and stand in stark contrast against Weegee’s earlier “straight” photography of crime and urban life.
As we move ahead into the 20th Century, notions of anonymity, celebrity, and notoriety are further interconnected with the many ways in which ready-made images have been appropriated, decontextualized, and transformed. In Marcel Duchamp’s “Wanted: $2,000 Reward” (1960), the artist procured a spoof announcement from 1923, designed for the amusement of tourists, and altered it by gluing two dark headshots of himself and adding his alter ego Rrose Sélavy to the already extensive catalogue of aliases listed. “For information leading to the arrest of George W. Welch. alias Bull, alias Pickens. etcetery, etcetery,” reads the text in urgent tabloid style: “Operated Bucket Shop in New York under name HOOKE, LYON and CINQUER” it continues, hinting at a kind of perpetual displacement of identity. This fixing and unfixing of individuality is also present in the hermetic “Man in Box” (ca. 1960s), of unknown authorship: a photograph of a free standing open box enclosing the photo of a man dressed in white covered by a piece of obscure glass. The instant recognition of a dandy complexion is immediately confounded by the non-specificity of the blurred details; a comforting sense of three-dimensionality undermined by an ultimate flatness.
On the other side of the spectrum is Andy Warhol’s “Most Wanted Man No. 11, John Joseph H., Jr.” (1964), a screen print involved in the creation of a 20-foot mural, suitably titled (after a NYPD booklet) with the double entendre “13 Most Wanted Men.” The naked face in the mugshot, picked in the wrong circumstances from the dark mass of anonymity, transforms through the artist’s vision into a James Dean-type character in a plausible poster of a film (never) titled “N.Y.C POLICE / 369 857 …” Warhol’s mural—consisting of the enlarged photos of all 13 wanted felons—was covered with silver paint only 48 hours after its unveiling by order of Governor Nelson Rockefeller. We can find the flip side of such political censorship in the dogmatic overtones of a woven tapestry based on a popular photograph of Mao Zedong playing ping pong. The original photo was taken by the Chairman’s full-time personal photographer Lü Houmin, a fact that underscores the role of staged and replicated photographic images as emblems of propagandistic historical narratives—and otherwise echoes “ping pong diplomacy,” or the rekindling of American-Chinese relations in the 1970s.
Altered photographs from the 1970s to the present indicate a gradual tendency to disguise, deconstruct, and dissociate images from their original contexts or obliterate referents altogether. In Dieter Roth’s “Düsseldorf” and “Heidelberg” pieces (from his “German Cities” series), the artist reproduced photographic postcards of landmarks in a grid. The very concrete and mundane imagery was then painted over with semitransparent solid colors—save for the shape of a single monument that appears superimposed to the different views. Barry Le Va’s photo-collages add spray-painted layers of abstraction onto already abstruse images of African artifacts. Gerald Slota’s literal and figurative scratching, cutting, burning, or piercing through the photographic chimera, speaks of the postmodern tendency to expose the artifice built-into all representational systems. Galerie Gugging’s Leopold Strobl and Johannes Lechner (alias Lejo) construct mentally charged settings that are reflections of nothing but the artists’ minds. Strobl utilizes photographs in printed media to create hybrid works with naturalistic pictorial facets such as texture, three-dimensionality, and depth of field merged into his very distinct sense of perspective and use of abstract volumes. Inspired by found photographs of nameless people, Lejo creates multilayered collages with visual analogies and juxtapositions that evoke the fortuitous associations and the dislocations of memory.
Whether “intervened” or not, all photographic images seem to exist in the land of make-believe, and perhaps—despite art’s finest efforts—reality is not a thing to capture but to be created. “Changed,” hence reaches its conceptual apex with Ellen Carey’s subject-less “Pull with Mixed and Off-Set Pods” (color positive and negative prints, 2011): non-representational photographs made with a large format Polaroid 20 x 24 camera. Mixing and off-setting the Polaroid pods—or the envelopes that hold the dyes—Carey creates novel color combinations and irregular shapes within the “pulls,” a verb turned into a noun to denote these vertical abstract shapes. The artist’s Polaroid practice transcends the picture/sign duality and, in her words: “frees the image from the centuries long tyranny of something to be captured.” The process thus becomes the subject, and we return to the foundation of photography as a “drawing with light,” or to the very beginning of this journey and the latent image that never was.

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present a selection of new paintings by William Engel and glass sculpture Jeremy Silva. This is the third exhibition by William Engel and first by Jeremy Silva at the gallery. The reception is on Thursday, December 8th, 6-8 pm.

William Engel’s work speaks a multilayered language that is at once personal and full of thoughtful inclusion, characterized by carefully organized rhythm of organic forms, mastery of the nuances of color and composition as well as a display of emotional intensity. As an artist who constantly interrogates what he sees, he strives to shape and reshape the basis of his art as well as impress upon us a sense of adventure and discovery. A prolonged viewing of his work is often richly rewarded as even what seems a restful background of his invented landscapes becomes an imaginary charged space of incredible tension in which the planes are subtly but sharply de-centered. His work evokes a poetic intimacy that allows the past to be continually revealed through the present. William Engel is a long-time faculty member of the New York School of Interior Design who has exhibited nationally since 1979 in numerous shows including the Friends Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He teaches Advanced Color at NYSID, a course that he wrote and has collaborated with several New York interior designers such as In Situ Design, Lilian B. Interiors, Richard Keith Langham, Charles Pavarini III, Robert Kaner Design, Ageloff Associates, and produced commissioned works of art for their site specific residencies in NYC, the Hamptons and clients across the country. His work has been installed in the Corporate lobby of Time Warner on Columbus Circle, New York and in the collection of Shering-Plough Headquarters, New Jersey, the NY School of Interior Design and the William Hotel in Manhattan, where he was commissioned to do seven works for the floors of the hotel. InSitu Design and Lilian B designed the hotel based on his work. His first book Portfolio Design for Interiors, co-authored with Harold Linton of George Mason University is scheduled for Spring 2017 with Bloomsbury London/Fairchild, New York.

Born from a desire to return to one’s paradise is, Honua, Hawaiian for Earth. Honua is artist Jeremy Silva’s effortless attempt to capture the essence of life on the Big Island of Hawai’I and to share its majesty. Jeremy was born and raised in Hawai’I where he witnessed firsthand the dramatic play among land, sea and air. At times, Honua would seem to release a vociferous cry of agitation for the stinging waves against black staccato landscape of volcanic remains, while at other times , the lapping water calmed the blue sun-slumbering shore at which Honua would seem to rejoice in mellifluous serenity. This ever-changing environment had a lasting impression on the artist even after he moved to New York more than thirteen years ago. The creation of Honua by Jeremy marks the passionate return to and pays homage to a sometimes forgotten nature. His pieces come into being with specially selected materials that conjure up visions of island life. The bulbosa air plant with its outreaching arms becomes the tentacles of a mysterious sea creature nestled in coral and driftwood, naked and scarred , takes on the form of a dancing whale. Each hand-blown glass vessel represents the enormity of earth’s power and the fine balance between peace and tumult, organic and structural, the known and the unexpected found in the realms of nature. And each piece is its own vision, welcoming viewers to explore, linger and return, only to explore again.

Sopheap Pich: Rang Phnom Flower, taking place from December 8, 2016, through February 4, 2017, will mark the debut of Tyler Rollins Fine Art’s newly expanded gallery space and will feature Sopheap Pich’s large scale Rang Phnom Flower sculpture. Around 25 feet in length and extremely complex in its construction, the work is Pich’s most ambitious single-form sculpture to date. It was first exhibited in early 2016 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, in For the Love of Things: Still Life, where it was shown alongside works by artists ranging from Picasso to Warhol and Mapplethorpe, selected predominantly from the museum’s renowned collection. At Tyler Rollins Fine Art, it will be presented together with new, smaller scale works by Pich that explore the same flower motif.

The works in the exhibition are all inspired by the vine-like flower clusters of the cannonball tree (“rang phnom” in Khmer), which has a strong cultural resonance within Cambodian culture and a personal significance for the artist. In Southeast Asia it is associated with the sal tree under which Buddha was born, and it is often planted near Buddhist temples. In fact, however, it originated in the Americas and was introduced by Europeans to Sri Lanka, where it was soon revered for its resemblance to the sal tree, which does not grow in tropical climates. It was then brought to Southeast Asia by Sri Lankans, who were responsible for the revitalization of Buddhism in that region. Many cannonball trees can be found around the Buddhist temples near Pich’s studio on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, and he became fascinated with the muscular, architectonic qualities of the flowers, as well as the sensuously flowing lines of the vines. His monumental Rang Phnom Flower sculpture is composed of hundreds of strands of rattan and bamboo shaped into interlocking grids and circular elements, the precise geometry of which contrasts strongly with the baroque contortions of the vegetal forms. Rendered in an enormously oversized scale, the flowers and vines dwarf the viewer, confronting him with the mesmerizing beauty and overwhelming power of nature. The work follows up on Pich’s widely exhibited 2011 Morning Glory sculpture, now in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which was featured in his solo exhibitions at Tyler Rollins Fine Art (2011) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013), and also shown at the Guggenheim Bilbao and Singapore’s Centre for Contemporary Art.

Pich is widely considered to be Cambodia’s most internationally prominent contemporary artist. Born in Battambang, Cambodia, in 1971, he moved with his family to the United States in 1984. After receiving his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999, he returned to Cambodia in 2002, where he began working with local materials – bamboo, rattan, burlap from rice bags, beeswax and earth pigments gathered from around Cambodia – to make sculptures inspired by bodily organs, vegetal forms, and abstract geometric structures. Pich’s childhood experiences during the genocidal conditions of late 1970s Cambodia had a lasting impact on his work, informing its themes of time, memory, and the body. His sculptures stand out for their subtlety and power, combining refinement of form with a visceral, emotive force. His work has been featured in numerous international museum exhibitions and biennials in Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States. His Wall Reliefs series debuted in a room sized installation at Documenta in 2012; and other biennials include the Moscow Biennale (2013), Dojima River Biennial (2013), Singapore Biennale (2011), Asian Art Biennial (2011), Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2009), and the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2009). His highly acclaimed solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, entitled Cambodian Rattan: The Sculptures of Sopheap Pich, was the museum’s first solo show given to a contemporary Southeast Asian artist. According to Art in America, the exhibition “can be regarded as a cameo retrospective, since its 10 works accurately reflect the range of the artist’s motifs from 2005 to late 2012.”

Pich’s work is included in such major museum collections as: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; M+, Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong; Singapore Art Museum; Queensland Art Gallery; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Reviews and feature articles about Pich have appeared in such publications as Artforum, Art in America, ArtNews, Art Newspaper, Asian Art News, Flash Art, New York Times, Orientations, Wall Street Journal. In 2014, Art Asia Pacific called Pich “the Southeast Asian artist to watch at the moment.”